"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it.
We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work.
When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway.
The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game.
Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.
Every Man's Education
After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth.
And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction.
But my inspiration still had some growth to come.
Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others.
With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.
This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.
Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground
Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?
Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world.
So here goes...
1. Embrace your idols.
It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice.
Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys.
2. There can't only be one.
Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander.
Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe.
3. Start purging.
There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you.
Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.
4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.
This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true.
Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers.
Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story.
New in Nature
Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan.
It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned.
It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial.
The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this:
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.
Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that.
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